Welcome to the September 17th edition of the Carnival of Human Resources, the virtual gathering, every other week, of bloggers focused on Human Resources and Leadership topics.

Let’s imagine all participants in a conference room, conducting a lively Q&A brown-bag lunch discussion.

Q: Can you teach Leadership in a classroom?
- Wally: Not really. Neither the person who aspires to become a leader nor HR departments should see leadership development as an activity to be outsourced to a classroom setting. Leadership is a lifelong apprentice trade, led by the learner himself/ herself. The most HR departments can do is to architect the right set of experiences to enable/ accelerate that development.

Q: Can you teach Social Intelligence in a classroom?
- Jon: According to a recent Harvard Business Review article, not really. Daniel Goleman and Richard Boyatzis say that “our brains engage in an emotional tango, a dance of feelings”. And you learn Tango by, well, dancing Tango. Goleman and Boyatzis add that “Leading effectively is about developing a genuine interest in and talent for fostering positive feelings in the people whose cooperation and support you need.”

Q: Can you provide an example of applying social intelligence in the workplace, and training on-the-job?
- Suzanne: Sure. Learn to appreciate your front line employees. They are the ones who interact with customers every day – which some companies seem to ignore at their peril.
- Denise: another one – What can you do when your team falls apart while you’re gone?.

Q: How can you generate positive feelings, when sometimes we get stuck in bad news and constant quarter-by-quarter pressures?
- Anna: Adding much needed perspective. Please note: Read the rest of this entry »

As you have probably noticed, a growing number of Expert Contributors are writing in our blog, so that we can collectively discuss the latest research and trends on cognitive and brain health, and the implications of brain research in general for our everyday lives. 

If you haven’t done so already, make sure to subscribe to our newsletter (above) and our RSS feed (on the right).

Below you have the profiles of some of our Contributors and links to their best articles with us so far. Enjoy!

Read the rest of this entry »

John Medina, Director of the Brain Center for Applied Learning Research at Seattle Pacific University, and author of Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School, wrote a great article for us on Brain Rules: science and practice, bringing brain research to daily life.

We enjoyed the book very much since it provides an excellent and engaging overview of recent brain research, so we are glad to see it reaching new corners. You may enjoy these 2 new resources:

1) A 52-minute video based on his Google talk on April 8th: click Here. Great discussion of the brain benefits of physical exercise and stress management.

2) An interview at Harvard Business Review, titled The Science of Thinking Smarter. I enjoyed some of the exchanges, such as this one (though I find the question a bit mystifying, are we assuming it is genes all that matter for leadership?):

Question: In the absence of genetic testing, do you see any merit in the sort of psychological testing some businesses use, such as the Myers-Briggs test?

Interested a good, non-technical, summary of the implications of recent brain science in our daily lives? Biologist John Medina offers that in his article below (as part of our Author Speaks Series) and in his new book: Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School. Enjoy!

(Note: John will be in the Bay Area on April 8 and 9th, speaking at Google and San Jose Rotary).

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Brain Rules

– By John Medina

Go ahead and multiply the number 8,388,628 x 2 in your head. Can you do it in a few seconds? There is a young man who can double that number 24 times in the space of a few seconds. He gets it right every time. There is a boy who can tell you the exact time of day at any moment, even in his sleep. There is a girl who can correctly determine the exact dimensions of an object 20 feet away. There is a child who at age 6 drew such lifelike and powerful pictures, she got her own show at a gallery on Madison Avenue. Yet none of these children could be taught to tie their shoes. Indeed, none of them have an IQ greater than 50.

The brain is an amazing thing.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Harvard Business Review just published (thanks Catherine!) this article on cognitive fitness, by Roderick Gilkey and Clint Kilts. We are happy to see the growing interest on how to maintain healthy and productive brains, from a broadening number of quarters. Without having yet fully read the article…it seems to provide a reasonable introduction to brain science, yet could have more beef regarding assessment, training and recommendations. In such an emerging field, though, going one step at a time makes sense. What really matters is thet fact itself that it was published.

The ABA (American Bar Association) Journal has a good article titled Law Hacks: 101 tips, tricks and tools to make you a more productive, less stressed-out lawyer, combining tips on email usage, software, and some brain tips from us:

• 67 “The Web site SharpBrains suggests self-improvement exercises. Try this one: Take five-minute visu­alization breaks with deep and regular breathing, picturing beautiful landscapes or pleasant or successful memories, especially after finishing a tough task.”
• 68 “Improve your mental acuity by subtracting numbers, i.e., 7 from 200 (200, 193, 186, 179 …) or practicing an exponential series (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 …). The point is not to become a math genius or be smarter than a fifth-grader, but just to keep your mind sharp.”
• 69 “It takes a system to be productive, but it’s also useful to try something different every day to stay sharp. For example, try commuting differently or talking to new people.”

Some more tips?

• Here is our full post on Brain Exercise FAQs.
• And the notes from a Stress Management Workshop we run at Accenture recently.
• You may also be interested in this article on Ten Important Truths About Aging: How we age is at least partially under our control, published by The Complete Lawyer, where you can learn why stress management is important, and more tips.
• And a Best practice for peak performance: emwave biofeedback

Orli from Neurontic tagged me with a new meme –writing about 8 Random Personal Facts- that is circulating among science bloggers.  Well, I will happily write about 8 facts that appeared in unexpected ways yet, seen with perspective, seem to be a type of non-random randomness, if that makes sense…  

1. As the oldest child, I was the most responsible/ serious/ with best grades…you get the picture. One of my youngest siblings specialized in teasing me and making my life difficult (from my perspective then). At some point, I realized that my automatic mental reaction to anything suspicious that happened in my life (my bike is not where I left it, there are 2 books missing…) was an angry “this must have been my brother!” followed by intra-family conflict and the need for UN peacekeepers. Let’s say he was responsible for only 40% of such events…so I realized my attitude made no sense and it was something I needed to control. So, at some point, I developed the mental habit of making fun of my own stupidity whenever that automatic reaction appeared, and protecting a more rational approach to solving the problem.
2. Around the same time, at a routine meeting between my mother, school staff and myself, someone made a comment along “Alvaro has spectacular grades, but he must understand that success in life does not depend on grades alone”. Fascinating, I remember thinking, how can that be possible? What may that mean? Is it not “fair” and self-evident that if I have great grades everything good will follow in life? Maybe this opened my mind to understanding that “intelligence” goes well beyond IQ…
3. For many years I kept a journal-like document with brief “lessons learned” and “concepts/ sayings / realities I don’t understand yet”. Something like a “diary of learning and things to be learned”. I don’t keep such a document anymore…and certainly not because now I understand everything.
4. My last 2 years in high school were extremely social, having relocated to a Read the rest of this entry »

Meme: “The term “meme” (rhyming with “theme”), coined in 1976 by the biologist Richard Dawkins, refers to a “unit of cultural information” which can propagate from one mind to another in a manner analogous to genes.

If you haven’t read Dawkins’ classic book The Selfish Gene…it is never too late to enjoy it!

There are some “memes” floating now around bloggers and I have been “tagged” (included) by 2 of them. So here you have:

1) On good daily habits: this is the original post, and here are Hueina’s My Simply Successful Secrets.

My “Simply Sucessful Secrets” habits that I follow close to every day, in more or less that sequence:

• Perform 10-15 minutes of Read the rest of this entry »

Fun article in the San Francisco Examiner today on how High-tech ‘brain gyms’ tone minds, reduce stress. Quotes:

• “SharpBrains and Posit Science are just two of a growing number of start-up companies leading the way in the area of packaging and developing suites of software they call “brain gyms.”
• “SharpBrains offers a suite of products that evaluate buyers’ needs and target their weakness, gently pushing for improvement, Fernandez said. One program helps improve memory using a number game (here); another provides instant biofeedback to users so they can practice breathing and positive thinking to reduce stress (here), Fernandez said.”
• “I can start seeing the changes in my stress level take place right in front of my eyes,” said Baba Shiv (profile here), a neuroscientist and professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, who uses Freeze-Framer 2.0 (here), one of the programs licensed by SharpBrains. By monitoring his stress level through heart monitors hooked to his personal computer at work, he discovered that constantly monitoring his e-mail inbox raised his stress level, Shiv said. Now he limits himself to checking e-mail every two hours, Shiv said.

The reporter did a great job in understanding and communicating a new and sometimes complex topic. Read the article: High-tech ‘brain gyms’ tone minds, reduce stress.

You can learn more about the research on self-control of our advisor Baba Shiv in The Frontal Cortex blog’s article Self-Control is a Muscle and in Mind Hacks: (un)emotional investment.

Today is International Women’s Day 2007.

Global consulting company Accenture organized a series of events, and I was fortunate to lead a fun workshop on The Neuroscience of Stress and Stress Management in their San Francisco office, helping over 125 accomplished women (and a few men) learn what stress is, its implications for our brain functioning, performance and health, and of course some tips and techniques to develop our “stress management” muscles. It was an honor to be able to wrap up a great event that included District Attorney Kamala D. Harris, two of the co-authors of This is Not the Life I Ordered, a video by Senator Dianne Feinstein, and some great Accenture women.